SEO Glossary

301

A permanent server redirect - a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers. Also useful for dealing with canonical issues.

Adwords

Google Pay Per Click - Contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.

Affiliate

An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.

Algorithm

A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.

Alt text

A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.

Analytics

A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

Anchor text

The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Back link

(Inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site. The method of SEO Linkbuilding is used to promote an individual website.

Black hat techniques

Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Blog

A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs use a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.

Bot

(robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

Bounce rate

The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

Canonical issues

(duplicate content) canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like Wordpress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs - although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including - using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

Click fraud

Improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google, because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their add spend.

CMS - Content Management System.

Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.

Comment spam

Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.

Content (text, copy)

The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content. It is essential to use an SEO copywriting service to stay ahead of the competition.

Contextual advertisement

Advertising which is related to the content.

CPC Cost Per Click

The rate that is paid per click for a PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertiser

CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions)

A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

Crawler (bot, spider)

A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

Directory

A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example. One of the many methods used for SEO Linkbuilding.

Duplicate content

Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.

Feed

Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.

Googlebot

Google’s spider program

Impression (page view)

The event where a user views a webpage one time.

Keyword density

The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized. Keyword density is usually measured during the SEO copywriting process.

Keyword research

The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

Landing page

The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP

Link text (Anchor text)

The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

META tags

Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

Natural search results

Also known as organic listings. These are the search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

Non reciprocal link

If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.

PageRank (PR)

A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

PPC (Pay per Click)

A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Reciprocal link

(Link exchange, link partner) Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.

Redirect

Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

robots.txt

A file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behaviour of search engine spiders.

Sandbox

There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.

SEM

Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

 SEO

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favourably ranked by the search engine.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page

Site map

A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.

Social bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

Social media

Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (Digg, Reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

Social media marketing (SMM)

Website or brand promotion through social media.

Toolbar PageRank (PR)

A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies page importance and is not the same as PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is only updated a few times a year, and is not a reliable indicator of current status.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator - more commonly known as a web address